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This is Volume One of The Army Air Forces in World War II, titled Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942, edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate. The University of Chicago Press first published it in 1948, and the Office of Air Force History reprinted it in 1983. The front matter explains how the AAF historical program was set up during the war. The index covers Pacific, Atlantic and European operations, and nothing in the text concerns unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Natal”13 pages
T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1 Air power today has decided the fate of nations. Germany with her powerful air armadas has vanquished one people after another. O n the ground, large armies have been mobilized to resist her, but each time it was that additional power in the air that decided the fate of each individual nation.. . . [As a con- sequence] we are in the midst of a great crisis. T h e time factor is our principal obstacle.43 This attitude was reflected in the sympathetic hearing accorded to AAF problems by the highest officials of the W a r Department. In commenting to Mr. Stimson in mid-1941 on the 500 per cent increase in AAF tactical squadrons, General Marshall wrote: “I do not think the public generally appreciates the vastness of the undertaking which has been imposed upon the Air Corps in both personnel and ma- teriel.” 44 That was almost an understatement. T h e public could understand the announcement of a new goal for aircraft production, for trained pilots, or for organized combat units; rarely, one might suspect, did citizens consider the implications of those increases in terms of their own occupations. What was required, in civilian terms, was something like this: for a medium-sized college to jump its graduating class from 300 to 50,000 students; for a manu- facturer just recovering from the depression to step up his production from 2,000 to 50,ooo items a year; for a firm doing business on a national scale to expand its buildings and grounds by geometric rather than arithmetic progression. All this within threc years and through the leadership of a very limited number of trained administrators. That progress was not smooth was all too apparent to those most in- timately concerned-to the harried staff officer who saw each suc- cessive program scrapped for another more difficult of attainment; to the crew chief on the line whose team was constantly bled for cadres; to the group commander attempting to build an effective organization with green pilots and obsolete planes. It is little wonder that before the period ended the war’s most expressive term-SNAFU-had been coined. Yet for all the confusion, by 7 December 1941the AAF had achieved a remarkable expansion, and the essential soundness of its methods was to be manifested in its later development under war conditions. New Concepts of Hemisphere Defense T h e expansion of the Army air arm which began in 1939 was mo- tivated by considerations of hemisphere defense. T h e term was new, the idea old. When President Roosevelt initiated the move toward re- I 16
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